


So We’ll Go No More a Roving

by StopTalkingAtMe



Category: Dishonored (Video Games)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Fade to Black, M/M, Marked!Martin, Post-Dishonored 2 (Video Game)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-26
Updated: 2020-09-26
Packaged: 2021-03-06 20:46:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,403
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26105167
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/StopTalkingAtMe/pseuds/StopTalkingAtMe
Summary: The night before Daud walked into his bar in Karnaca, Teague Martin dreamed of the time he almost died.
Relationships: Daud/Teague Martin
Comments: 7
Kudos: 20
Collections: Press Start VI





	So We’ll Go No More a Roving

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Requiem](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Requiem/gifts).



> This fic disregards the plots of the books, in particular The Return of Daud. I suggest putting it down to the Butterfly Effect. :D The title comes from the poem by Lord Byron. 
> 
> I hope you enjoy! It was a lot of fun to write.

The night before Daud walked into his bar in Karnaca, Teague Martin dreamed of the time he almost died. In the dream, he’d been back on Kingsparrow Island with Havelock and Pendleton, those awful interminable hours waiting for Corvo Attano to descend on them like a storm come raging out of the Void. He liked to think that somewhere inside his heart he’d seen Havelock’s treachery coming, but the truth was he’d been too busy preparing himself to face the Royal Protector. Pendleton was still clinging to his belief that Corvo was a merciful man, but Martin remembered what he had done to Campbell, and only a fool would have considered that mercy.

He could still taste the poison in his mouth when he woke up. Iron in the back of his throat. A memory of black eyes, empty as the Void, and a voice that echoed in his ears like rushing blood. When he opened his eyes Corvo was standing over his bed.

On the hazy edge between sleep and wakefulness, he saw the glint of the light on that obscene mask and felt the prickle of magic in his blood and beneath his skin, radiating out from his heart. He waited, trapped in an instant held in suspension so that it seemed it might last forever, knowing that at any moment he’d feel the knife against his throat.

He’d been waiting for it a long while now.

Then Corvo eased back into the shadows and vanished. There was nothing there and there never had been, and it felt like something had been stolen from him yet again.

He’d seen the Royal Protector for real about a month before that.

Smoking a cigarette and brooding on the balcony, he’d felt the chill of the Void sluice through his veins, and he’d looked up and seen a figure vanish into thin air and reappear on the rooftop above, far faster than any man could climb. Even that man.

It was a sensation he’d felt before, and it took him a moment to place where and when.

Holger Square, long ago. Until this moment, the first and the only time Corvo had used magic in front of him, and he hadn’t been quite sure what he’d seen other than a flicker of movement at the edge of his vision, held fast as he was in the stocks with his vision restricted.

It hadn’t been until later, when he’d recognised the Mark on Corvo’s hand, that his suspicions were confirmed, and even then, knowing what he knew, the shrines to the Outsider he’d destroyed, the heretics he’d helped hunt down, he hadn’t understood. Back then, Corvo’s use of magic had been as a twinge at the edge of his consciousness and he’d had so many bruises it had barely even registered. Here in Karnaca, and now that he was Marked himself, it felt like the Void had pierced his heart with a fish-hook and yanked it right out of his chest.

Corvo had finally come for him. He’d known it would happen sooner or later. He’d been waiting for this moment for a long time.

Corvo had been the finest swordsman in all the Isles in his day, so it was said. Once Martin would have relished the chance to test his skill with a blade against a man with a reputation like that – friendly competition or otherwise – but the opportunity had never presented itself. Maybe now it had.

But Corvo hadn’t come for him. He’d kept moving, and each time he reached for his black magic that yanking sensation repeated in Martin’s chest, like calling to like, making him catch his breath. Gradually it grew weaker until eventually it stopped and he knew Corvo was gone. He hadn’t even known Martin was there.

Another chance stolen away.

* * *

His bar stood at the more salubrious end of the _Campo Seta_ Dockyards, perched high up so the breeze carried away most of the stink from the slaughterhouses. About a month after Emily Kaldwin had been restored as Empress, Martin had started hearing rumours. He dealt in rumours almost as much as he did alcohol, and over the years his bar had developed a reputation as a place where business could reliably be done in one of the back rooms, with an equally reliable owner who knew how to keep his mouth shut and his eyes averted. It was a convenient reputation to have.

There was an art to bartending, the retirement career of choice for countless ex-soldiers. And, apparently, the occasional disgraced ex-High Overseer. As difficult as it had been at first to take a step back and embrace being no one important again, it wasn’t the first time he’d had to reinvent himself out of necessity. He kept his head down, paid his dues to the Grand Serkonan Guard and to whichever gang was in the ascendancy that month, and learned the knack of nudging a drunk onto a particular topic of conversation, righting them when they got sidetracked.

The whispers said that the Knife of Dunwall had finally returned to Karnaca, and that he was going after the Eyeless for some reason of his own. And that got Martin’s attention.

Wiping a glass dry with methodical precision with his back to the bar, he’d frowned, thinking it through until he realised Jenna, the girl he’d hired to help around the bar, was bored and idle and watching him in the mirror as she fanned herself in the stultifying heat. He nodded to her, then to a table which needed wiping down. She rolled her eyes, but slid off the stool to get back to work.

Stocky and pale-skinned with sun-darkened freckles, she’d been born in Karnaca, although her parents were both Morleyan immigrants who’d come over separately in the years following the insurrection. Her late father had been a stevedore, and her mother still worked as a whalemeat-processor in the slaughterhouse (with a black market sideline in filched whalebone he wasn’t meant to know about), and she liked hearing him talk about Morley when he was tired and restless and in the mood to reminisce. Safer than his time in Dunwall, or the reasons why he’d found himself in Karnaca. She talked about visiting one day once she’d saved up enough to get the hell away from Serkonos and she saw through him to a degree that probably wasn’t safe.

Once, while she’d been collecting glasses at the end of a busy night, he’d told her he had the heart of a poet, and she’d stopped to look at him, a glass suspended from each crooked finger.

“You know, my da used to say the exact same thing,” she said.

Martin grinned to himself, knowing what was coming. “Did he?”

“Uh-huh,” she’d said, smiling at him to soften the joke that they both know wasn’t really a joke. “He was always full of shit too.”

Now she strolled over to slap the damp cloth down on the bar, blowing a strand of hair out of her face. “They give me the creeps,” she said.

A snort from the source of the latest rumour, an ancient ex-sailor with a face like boiled leather whose ability to know everything impressed even Martin. “Better them than the Overseers.” He knocked back the rum, then nodded to Martin for another. “Least heretics know when to let honest men be.”

“What about Daud?” Martin asked casually, and the sailor glanced up, eyeing him as Martin poured him another glassful.

“That’s right,” he said, nodding slowly. “You were in Gristol ‘round that time, weren’t you?”

“I try to forget.”

The old man grunted. “Bad times.”

“Right,” Jenna said dryly, tapping her hand on the bar. “Because they’re so much better these days.”

The sailor shared a ‘kids today’ look with Martin, who in turn gave Jenna a mock-rueful look at the old man’s temerity at throwing Martin’s lot in with his. The look she shot back didn’t bear remarking on. There was no question about it: he was getting old. But maybe not quite willing to stop lying to himself about getting old. That seemed like something at least.

Not long after that conversation he’d witnessed a skirmish between the Eyeless and a handful of Overseers, and it had made his skin crawl at the use of magic. At the same time the Mark hidden beneath his shirt flared with a bright searing joy and flooded him with the sick urgent need to use it, to explore whatever powers he had at his disposal and the reason why he might have been branded above his heart rather than upon his hand. It felt every bit like the violation that it was. 

The Mark burned him right down to the bone, its shadow a bruise upon his ribs, as he watched the men he would have once called brothers going up against the heretics. He was armed himself, a bandolier and pistol secreted beneath his jacket and the urge to join the affray was overwhelming, but he couldn’t risk drawing attention to himself and so instead he slipped away.

He meant to put the whole bloody business out of his mind, but it wouldn’t let go of him. It kept creeping back. Got him waking in the night, gasping and clawing at his chest in the certainty his heart had stopped. The Void running beneath his skin like a river that had broken its banks. The Outsider himself, that black-eyed bastard, source of all the world’s sorrows, whispering inside his skull. The normally stifling heat of the Karnaca night had been replaced by the dead ice-cold air of the Void, and it seemed like an abyss had opened up before him and he was teetering on the brink. And in those moments he remembered the rumours he’d been hearing about Daud.

So he asked a few more questions, poked around a little more, and told himself he was doing it because rumour was currency, and not because he couldn’t shake the feeling of his having unfinished business or because that there was someone in Karnaca who might know him, who he was, what he’d done. Someone else who’d been touched by the Void.

The more he poked around the more the whole business reeked worse than the slaughterhouses, and every one of Martin’s instincts was telling him to stay the hell out of it. That if the Eyeless, that wretched little band of failed witches, heretics and deviants, could succeed in doing what countless Overseers, city guards, gang members and even the Royal Protector himself had failed to do and take out the bastard assassin known as the Knife of Dunwall, then that was all to the good. Nothing whatsoever to do with him.

Perhaps if Daud had pitted himself against one of Karnaca’s other gangs he might well have succeeded in shrugging it off, but the Eyeless were heretics, and apostate or not, Martin hadn’t quite given up on the Strictures yet.

So he put a word in an ear here and there, greased numerous palms with the coin he’d squirrelled away, until he’d found an insider with insights into the Eyeless plan to incapacitate Daud, and then it was simply a matter of a few more words in a couple of other ears, and he was shoving a wrench into a finely tuned clockwork mechanism and stepping back to enjoy the wreckage.

In truth, he hadn’t really expected there to be any wreckage. Hadn’t really believed that anything would come of it, or that he’d ever find out what had happened, until that evening, which was hot even for Karnaca, making the Jewel of the South slumber in a languid doze. The sky was a sickly lavender purple, shading to scarlet at the horizon and near the water’s edge, and it was dark enough that it could have been the reflection of the sunset rather than the blood of butchered whales. When a breeze came in off the water, it caught up the briny slaughterhouse reek, and that combined with a bloodfly infestation too close for comfort meant business was slow. After the lunchtime rush, he could have counted the number of customers on one hand, and at that moment they had none at all. Jenna was slumped at the bar, yawning over her book and slapping lazily at the odd bloodfly landing to feast on the sheen of sweat on her skin, and he was just starting to think about telling her she might as well take herself off home before it got dark, when Daud walked in.

Martin never had seen him in the flesh, but his face was familiar from the posters, even if he’d aged significantly since then. More than he should have, maybe. He still looked like a killer. It was there in the way he carried himself, the way he scanned the room. His gaze snagged momentarily on Jenna, who glanced up, looking like she wasn’t sure whether she should be irritated at the interruption or relieved to finally have something to do. The decision still weighing in the balance, she set the book face down and hopped off her stool. Daud’s eyes, meanwhile, had reached Martin. Not passed over him, but stopped dead.

Daud had recognised him. No reason why he should have. They’d never met, and Martin was officially dead. And he’d changed in appearance, partly by design, partly due to age. He wore his hair, which even then had already been greying and was now more silver than brown, longer than he used to and he no longer took pains to keep himself impeccably clean-shaven.

There’d been talk of a Sokolov portrait once, and the debauched old letch had even done a few preliminary sketches, but like so many things there’d never been time, and if Anton Sokolov had ever made a start on the portrait itself it would have long since been consigned to a storeroom and left to rot, assuming it hadn’t been burnt outright. His face had been forgotten. There was probably only a handful of people left in the world who might have recognised him – Corvo Attano, for one. Emily Kaldwin, perhaps, although she’d been so young back then he couldn’t be certain. He hadn’t thought Daud was one of them. Clearly, he’d been wrong.

As Jenna started around the back of the bar, he caught hold of her arm.

“Why don’t you go home?” he suggested. “I can finish up here.”

“You sure?” She glanced at Daud, who was walking over to the bar, his face impassive.

“I’m sure. There’s nothing much left to do anyway.”

The slightest flicker of doubt then she shrugged and vanished into the back room. Behind the bar, Martin distractedly rolled his shirt sleeves up. In the mirror, he caught the moment Daud shot a look at the back of his hand. The man was gloved himself, but beneath the leather it would be there, the same Mark he’d glimpsed on Corvo once, the same Mark that was flaring on his chest even now, so painful his breath hitched. It burned with a searing heat from inside his skin, painful enough that he had to bite down very deliberately on the tip of his tongue to prevent himself from gasping out in pain until the moment had passed and he could exhale again, glancing at Daud without quite meeting his eyes.

“Get you a drink?”

“Whiskey. Arran Castle.” Daud took a seat at the bar and turned, scanning the room.

“Fine choice,” he said, reaching for the bottle.

“Slow night?”

“It’s been quiet.” He set a glass on the bar, uncapped the bottle and poured Daud a couple of fingers. The assassin grunted, nodded, drank. He’d been in a fight recently, judging by the scrape on his cheek, but he’d made no concessions to disguising his appearance. Well, why should he? Everyone assumed he was dead. Monsters like Daud, they weren’t supposed to come back.

Jenna emerged from the back, eyeing them both with idle curiosity, and took her leave with a ‘good night’ and ‘you’re still paying me for the rest of the evening, right?’ at the door.

When she’d gone the silence that settled on the bar was absolute. It was interrupted finally by Daud setting his glass carefully and very deliberately on the bar, the dull clink of the glass against the polished oak. Mouth dry, Martin said, “Another?”

Daud gave a nod, his ice-water eyes on Martin, his regard so intense it felt like a physical sensation creeping over his skin. Like he was being stripped back to his secrets, and Martin had a lot of secrets. It was the way he’d imagined it would have felt if Corvo had come for him, the retribution that had been owing all these years carried on the wind that reeked of rancid whale oil and blood, and instead this man had come in his stead.

The man who’d butchered an Empress. Slaughtered many of his brothers. Good men, some of the fellows who’d died in the Flooded District on Campbell’s orders in a clumsy attempt to neutralise a threat. With his back to Daud, his grip tightened around the neck of the bottle as he considered swinging around and smashing it into Daud’s skull, whether it would buy him enough time to reach the loaded pistol he kept beneath the bar. Then he saw Daud watching him in the mirror, his expression carefully neutral, and he let out a breath, forced his shoulders to ease off.

When he turned back round, the moment of righteous anger had passed. The man who’d once called those Overseers brothers was gone. That was a life he'd left behind him, shed like snakeskin. He was done with it. And he didn’t feel much like dying today. Daud was armed. Heavily so, with a blade and a pistol at least and probably several more weapons secreted away. The faintest trace of astringent choke dust lingered in the air making his eyes water. Maybe when he’d been younger, he might have had a chance to reach that pistol before Daud killed him first, but those days were gone. He was getting soft.

Daud brought the glass to his mouth, eyeing Martin over the rim. “I heard you’d died.”

The possibility of feigning ignorance occurred to him, but he passed on it as quickly as he had violence. “I did die. I came back.”

Daud’s eyes dropped to his left hand again. Martin raised it, clenched into a loose fist, displaying the unmarked back.

Daud shifted on his stool. Such a little thing, little more than a man shifting his weight, and the stools weren’t comfortable, but somehow contrived to make his message of menace clear. “What do you want from me?”

_Maybe I was just curious to see what would happen._

“You know the saying, the enemy of my enemy.”

“The Eyeless.”

“Who else?”

To this Daud said nothing. Martin let the moment stretch out, rolling his shoulders. He was no stranger to the deliberate silence, and his momentary discomposure had passed; he was just getting into his stride. He wasn’t so easily intimidated. He set a second glass on the bar and poured himself a drink, taking his time over it, letting the silence deepen before he finally spoke, picking his words carefully.

“The Eyeless are degenerate heretics. I’d see them all burn.”

“Those are bold words for an apostate.”

Martin smiled, and placed his hand over his heart. Right over the Mark. “I still carry the Strictures in here.”

“The Abbey wouldn’t see it that way.”

“The Abbey is riddled with corruption at every level, from the High Overseer down.”

Daud looked at him like he was trying to figure something out. “Whereas you would have been incorruptible?”

Martin leaned on the bar and considered this, bringing the tumbler to his mouth. To his surprise, he found he was rather enjoying himself. “When it came to the Abbey I was,” he said reflectively. “I’d have torn the corruption out, root and branch.”

Torn it out and refashioned the Abbey as it should have been, where men like him who’d come late to it, and whose faith was often stronger than those of the Overseers who still bore the marks of resentment at being stolen from the families they barely remembered, were treated as the equals that in theory they were meant to be. And rightly so: faith that men came to of their own free will often burned all the brighter. He knew that first hand.

“I’d have been remembered as the greatest High Overseer since John Clavering, the man who mended relations between the Abbey and the throne and trusted advisor to Emily Kaldwin herself. Speaking of whom...” He cast Daud a glance, and lifted his glass. “Long live the Empress. This one at least.”

Something flickered in Daud’s eyes, too quick for Martin to identify. It might have been anger or a warning, but he chose to think it something closer to amusement. Most likely it was nothing of the kind.

“She was a sweet girl, as I recall,” Martin said. “If we’d been there to guide her...”

“By ‘we’ you mean ‘you’,” Daud said.

Martin swallowed down the whiskey, grinning. “Of course. It’s part of the duty of the High Overseer to guide the Emperor or Empress in spiritual matters. Instead the only man she would trust was the Royal Protector and look how that worked out.”

“If only he’d done the gracious thing and gone quietly to his death,” Daud said dryly.

“He always was stubborn.”

Daud studied him, weighing him up. “You talk too much, Martin.”

He couldn’t help wincing at the sound of that name spoken aloud. He’d gone by others, but that was the one that had stuck. It was the one he’d thought he’d die under.

“It’s been a long time since I had the chance.” He paused, rubbed his jaw. “Did you come to kill me?”

“I wanted to know who helped me and why.”

“And now you have your answer.”

“Part of it. I still don’t know the reason.”

“I told you–”

“The real reason.”

Martin’s mouth was dry again, a sickly taste in the back of his throat. “Call it unfinished business,” he said. “Or else...” He stopped, then continued, his voice low, “Whatever it was the Eyeless were going to do to you, no one deserved that.”

“So it was an act of mercy?”

Martin gave a chilly smile. “I’m not much for mercy, truth be told, but if you want to call it that you can. The real question is why you came here.”

“I already told you.”

“Ah yes, you did, didn’t you? And I believe it about as much as you believe me.” He pointed the glass at Daud. “Not that I don’t appreciate the chance to finally meet the Knife of Dunwall in the flesh and reminisce about old times with a fellow veteran of that bloody business, but I’m no fool. You could have come when the bar was busy.” Sipping his drink, Daud glanced around at the deserted bar, and Martin laughed. “We do get busy from time to time.”

“I know.”

That silenced Martin momentarily. “Like I said, I’m not a fool. You want something from me, and I’m afraid you’re going to be disappointed. Teague Martin is long dead and buried. He died in the Rat Plague along with countless others. I’m finished with that life.”

“If that was true,” Daud said, “I wouldn’t be here.”

* * *

He cooked for them both, the solid fare his mostly Morleyan clientele wanted, a stew of beef and dumplings, the sort of food that would see them through a hard day’s work hacking apart whale carcasses, heaving great slabs of flesh and blood and blubber from butcher block to cart. The sort of food he thought he’d lost his taste for back in Dunwall, but it turned out he hadn’t journeyed all that far from his roots after all. He cooked the way his mother used to, food that was good for sitting in the belly like a cannon ball and soaking up copious amounts of alcohol. By the time he’d finished, mopping up the last drops of gravy with a hunk of bread and wiping sweat from his brow, he almost felt sober.

They talked late into the night. Which was to say Martin talked and Daud mostly just listened, measuring him up. He was a reticent man, sharing little about himself or his business with the Eyeless or his purpose for being in Karnaca – or Martin’s for that matter – but that he had a purpose here was beyond question. He’d been travelling the Isles, he said, in a self-imposed exile from Dunwall. And Martin, who’d been a rover himself in his past and knew full well a man didn’t need a reason to wander other than restlessness and a hunger for something else, some unspecified _other_ , knew it had to be more than that in Daud’s case.

A man like Daud could never be restless for long. He’d need a purpose. Knives were meant to be wielded.

Daud didn’t say much but he had a way of listening that suggested he was hearing all the things Martin wasn’t saying, the unspoken truths he was dancing around. He appreciated the company. Even if there was a stillness about this man that put Martin in mind of Corvo Attano. But unlike Corvo, Daud wouldn’t judge him for what he’d done. How could he, when he’d done so much worse himself? And that was an impressive record, given the amount of blood Martin had spilled throughout his life.

But there was something else there too, some sense of fellow feeling. Daud’s legend was well-known, how he’d gathered up all the orphans and street-kids of Dunwall and taught them to kill and wield borrowed magic. Yet now here he was alone again, wearing silence like a cloak. It made Martin think of Corvo, all but silent and moving about the corridors and grounds of the Hound Pits like a wraith. And of himself: how more and more these days he’d been missing the sense of camaraderie and belonging that came of fighting alongside men he could call brother. As a soldier, as an Overseer. Even alongside the other Loyalists, until that fellowship broke beyond repair. There were days when he would even have been glad to see Pendleton again, to get the chance to share a drink with the blueblood piece of shit for old times sake.

He sighed. The Strictures aside, this was why he didn’t drink much these days; it got him maudlin. He gazed into his beer in a moody silence, before he bestirred himself and looked at Daud, who met his gaze, whatever thoughts going on behind his eyes unreadable as Martin asked him if he had somewhere to stay.

* * *

He set Daud up in the spare room, where there was a rickety bedframe buried somewhere beneath the bottles and crates of alcohol of dubious provenance. He figured if anyone had the wit to find it, it was probably Daud.

When he passed back along the corridor, the door was open, and Daud was inside stripping off. He’d already removed his gloves and it was to the Mark of the Outsider, branded on his left hand, that Martin’s gaze went, his chest aching. Like calling to like, as though Daud could simply have clenched his fist and crushed Martin’s heart to a pulp.

For all that he’d learned about the Void throughout his life, he’d known nothing. The question he’d been dancing around all night, the one he hadn’t been able to bring himself to ask, rose up in his mind and he still didn’t know how to go about asking it.

“Want something?” Daud said, shrugging off his shirt. He was a big man but lean, hard planes of ropey muscle, without a spare inch of fat anywhere on his frame. Countless scars though, cutting through the greying hair on his chest. More than Martin, and Martin had plenty.

“I came to see if there was anything you needed.”

Daud slung his shirt over the back of a crate of Morleyan apple brandy and shook his head, then when Martin didn’t move, he turned and leant against the door frame, looking at Martin as if he knew all his secrets already. Maybe he did.

He certainly didn’t look surprised when Martin stepped in close and kissed him. It was the closest he’d come to anyone in a while; even during the Fugue Feast he couldn’t risk it. Which was to say it had been a very long time.

When he pulled away, Daud gripped his jaw, stared at him for a moment with those cool expressionless eyes, then kissed him back, bruisingly hard. The door frame pressed into Martin’s back. Daud kissed the same way he talked, rough, brusque and with the promise of violence to come. He tasted of the whiskey, and Martin lost himself in the moment, something so sweet for all that it was touched with bitterness, for all that he wasn’t sure if he should have regretted setting this in motion. There would be consequences to come, he was certain of that.

Then Daud’s hand slid up underneath his shirt, finding its way unerringly to his Mark, and the damn thing _twisted_. Hard enough to make him flinch.

He disentangled himself from the kiss, breathing hard, forehead to forehead with Daud. The assassin’s hand – his _left_ hand – was pressing against Martin’s Mark, as if even hidden he knew it was there. Martin set his own hand over the back of Daud’s, feeling the cold of the Void through the crumpled linen, trying to catch his breath. When he exhaled, he expected to see it frosting in the air.

“How do you live with it?” he asked, more to himself than to Daud. He wasn’t really expecting an answer, but he got one anyway.

“I could show you,” Daud said.

* * *

Afterwards, while the sky lightened and the light of the new day bled across the water, they sat out on the balcony where the heat was a little less oppressive. Martin smoked his way through the last of his cigarettes, his undershirt sticking to the sweat pooling in the small of his back, while Daud finally got around to telling him what he was doing in Karnaca. There was an ache in his chest, the memory of Daud’s hands ghosting over his skin. The Mark itched, a low-key burn that made his mouth dry.

He took a drag on the cigarette, blew out a stream of smoke, watching the way Daud watched the ship in the harbour as he talked. Martin knew the captain of that ship a little: she smuggled in cases of liquor for him from Morley from time to time, and he wondered what business Daud could possibly have with her.

He’d been right: Daud did have a purpose and it wasn’t at all the one he might have expected.

All those nights closing his ears to the sound of the Void, to the insidious voice of the Outsider whispering so sweetly in his ear, twining its way into his heart like a serpent. The Outsider, who’d branded him, turned him into a heretic against his will. And all right, so he’d agreed to it – so he’d looked the bastard in his black eyes and said the one word he thought he’d never say to that abomination, but given his only other option was death it had been no kind of choice at all.

He’d thought he’d left his roving days long, long behind him. He’d thought he’d live out the rest of his life quietly keeping his head down, waiting for the moment Corvo Attano finally came for him. He wasn’t that man any more. He didn’t go looking for trouble these days. And he was too old to be one of the Knife of Dunwall’s strays.

“Well?” Daud said.

Martin considered, took one last drag on the cigarette, then he stubbed it out, twisting it against the stone. He flicked it over the edge of the balcony, watched the ember spiral for a moment before it plunged out of sight below.

“I’m in,” he said.


End file.
